Pulp Shakespeare

With grog, broadswords, and kidney pie standing in for beer, automatic pistols, and the "Royale With Cheese," this lively and imaginative onstage reinvention of Quentin Tarantino's film "Pulp Fiction" as an Elizabethan thriller is an often appealing and unexpectedly harrowing drama. That the play, essentially a line-by-line transposition of Tarantino's dialogue into Tudor-esque patter (credited to five authors, including director Jordan Monsell) works so well on its own terms is due to the fact that Shakespeare himself is top-heavy with the film's tropes of slaughter, betrayal, rage, and lust. Although the conceptual joke wears a little thin midway through, Monsell's production opts for suspenseful intensity over camp, with artful results.